Page 110 - Undead Alewives

Author Notes:

No guest author today. Guest strips take time to approve and create, especially on short notice. But that's okay; I had a couple of backups prepared. Hopefully, I'll have a nice buffer for you before the next update.

This is an alternate joke that was originally planned to go somewhere in the 80-82 page range. But those strips called for a little more dramatic tension (that wouldn't survive getting blown apart by a cultural reference), so I scrapped it. I kept the script, though.

Weeee're Mares of the D&D table!
We attack whoever we're able.
But once or twice
We roll some dice
That are quite un-play-able!
It's a busy life in the party...
I have to roll Diplomacyyyyyyy.
Do dee do dee do dede do,
Do dee dodity do! Critical!

*Resurrection spells being cast*
"It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead."

*RD flying through Ghastly Gorge, rolls vs quarray eels eating her*
GM: "She doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time."
RD: "What?"
GM: "The eel doesn't get her. I'm explaining to you because you look nervous."
RD: "I wasn't nervous. Maybe I was a little bit "concerned" but that's not the same thing."

During my old gaming times, we quoted the prerequisite movies and such, but what seems to be unique to us were the quotes from The Belgariad and The Melorian book series.
Fireball goes bad? "Too much sulfur. Too much sulfur."
Catch a disease? "Don't shave! Do you want to catch a cold in your face?!"
And so on.

Due to events beyond out control, it's no longer on the web, but a long series of events in the history of my chracter Fireflare is known as the Iron Claw saga. It is both amusing and horrifying. And involves sex.

Back when we had only two Wednesday night tables, the other DM's party were stuck inside while a mob gathered around the entrance to the building they were visiting. Hoping to avoid being mobbed, they asked if there were other exits.

The DM mentioned the large bay window. When a player went to open it, she said, "It doesn't open."

It then dawned on the party wizard that he could teleport through the window... and he went on to demonstrate why that would be a bad idea under the circumstances.

It was only after the mob kicked him about for a round or two that another player asked a critical question: "Couldn't we... y'know... just smash the window?"

A few weeks later, they got the chance to do that again... with a catapult.

The LBW tends to reappear any time a DM wants the attention of players who'd been there for the original encounter. It's shown up in a couple of dragon lairs, one sewer, and the middle of a market square. I'm pretty sure at least one enemy was described as wielding it in combat... at least until the wave of profanity that its appearance always inspires died down again.

I was playing a female human focused transmuter and the party was trying to screw up a ritual to bring forth the goddess of ship wrecked cannibalism. In order to do this we decided to make them think that there was a larger force there than there was. While we were moving constructs that were meant to look like an army everyone was yelling things. My character decided to yell, "For Boobs," "For Pony," and "For women." The DM decided to roll with it and made one of the adepts run around trying to convince everyone they were going to be raped by ponies.

Next session our party ran into the disarrayed sacrificial camp and my character, having heard the adept yell about rapist ponies, decided to alter self into an anthropomorphic pink pony. The cultist that was warning others of rapist ponies now has a phobia and has been given the name of Jane.

Zombie apocalypse GURPS campaign, and we're all playing fairly generic civilians. Long story short, our fast-talker disguises himself and walks into the command tent of a survivalist militia, with the party sniper on overwatch. "Trust me" was supposed to be the cue for the sniper to make a trick shot (shooting a shot glass off the tray the face was carrying) in order to discourage the inevitable beatdown.

Meanwhile, the sniper's character is just sitting there with a faint smirk, enjoying watching the face hanging in the breeze. For moths afterwards, "Trust me" was our shorthand for either "I am about to screw you over" or "Let me guess, you're gonna screw me over?".

First session of a campaign. One player is playing an extremely paranoid Binder. He uses Focalor's Lightning on a fountain inside the dungeon.

Knight: "And why did you do that?"
Binder: "Might be an elemental in there."

He proceeded to attack every water source, open flame, and unusual-looking rock formation he passed throughout the entire game. If he'd have figured out a way to attack the air he probably would have tried it.

In a campaign I ran, there was this gnome. He would come running out of the strangest places at the oddest times. His name was Gag, and he carried a flag proclaiming it as such. So you see, he was the running Gag.

When we were playing paranoia, one of my players couldn't ever remember where we were.
Gm: you come to the end of the watery tunnel-
P1: But I thought we're in the ocean!
Gm: we are. This is a tunnel
P2: It's a boat ramp.
Later
GM: You climb into the relative safety of the brown and green things.
P1: Trees? But I thought we were in the ocean!
GM: you crashed into the beach ages ago!
Gm: No! You crashed

Seth, a dimention hopping demi-god retired from his own campaign because of a case of "What was I thinking allowing that?" has made a cameo in EVERY game since then, even for different systems. D&D, NWoD, M&M, Dragon Age, Maid, Henshin, whatever. He's even 'popped in' on card and board games. It's become a sort of mini game to see how long we can go before something makes him come in.

Best in-joke came from one of the initial sessions of an early campaign about five or six years ago. Our cleric at the time, who was new and had confused his morningstar with a missile weapon, blurted out,

"I'm going to throw my morningstar!"

That failed spectacularly, but his horse was smarter than he was and carried his unconscious body out of the range of battle. We tracked it down and revived him and to this day we have never let that go.

Whenever someone plans to make a Leeroy Jenkins move, the chorus is "I'm going to throw my morningstar!"

I was playing a cleric in a 4th ed campaign. I basically went as far into the healing direction as I could, making him as much of a walking bandage box as I could.

He was so based around healing that I named him "Hellis Ples" after "Healz Plz".

Any way, as a sacrifice for the healing, his attack bonuses were a little low. He did alright with most attacks, but there was one that never hit. As in, I used it nearly every round in every encounter for a month, and it hit maybe 3 times.

It was called Lance of Faith, and since then Lance of Faith (usually said in the derpiest voice possible) has been shorthand for an incredible failure.

In one of the first Lair Assault sessions here, we wound up just one player shy of a full table. We waited 45 minutes while the DM drove out to pick up a fourth player he'd recruited from among his friends.

His character died in the first round, before any of us got a turn. (Harsh, but that's Lair Assault.) After a moment of silence, one of the other players asked, "Can he play my horse?"

Surprised that someone had spent so much of their starting gold on a horse, the DM allowed it. After all, how much harm could it do? He didn't even care about letting it get opportunity attacks.

Well, he didn't care right up until it scored its second critical hit in a row. Then they started taking it personally.

When our barbarian dropped, the horse calmly grabbed him and hauled him out of the first room. We got the barbarian back up and across that room... and then the floor collapsed under the horse, dropping him twenty feet onto boiling mud.

The barbarian insisted on going back for that horse. I noted we didn't have the healing resources to revive him.

It didn't matter. He was going back for that horse.

I promised to build a memorial for the animal.

It didn't matter. He was going back for the horse.

I promised to pay resurrection costs for the horse, assuming any of us survived the fight.

He still wouldn't budge. That's when I pointed out that we had no way of hauling the horse back up to us.

That's when a geyser exploded, throwing the horse back up onto one of the remaining platforms. That's when I gave up. We revived the horse and carried on to the next room.

And after all that trouble, the party then proceeded to get the horse killed by sending it to scout ahead of us.

Maybe I should have used all caps, but I was going for the princess bride reference there.
Ah well, trying to be subtle on the Internet, clearly the third worst mistake after starting a land war in Asia or matching wits with Vizini

Our group was 3-4 sessions into an adventure, when one of our players who rarely appears showed up for a session. The DM, not anticipating this player's arrival, made him a fisherman in the village the main party was searching.
Long story short, we had to get to a third story apartment with all possible speed, so our infrequent player asked if he could pole-vault through the window using his fishing rod. The DM allowed it, and the player proceeded to roll the only natural 20 anyone rolled all night.
Later, the fishing rod became that character's Legendary Weapon.

Another time, we were playing the Serenity RPG. I was playing a mechanic, and the DM had allowed me to create a flaw that I think we ended up calling, "Unholy Obsession (Machines/Mechanics)." This manifested in a number of ways - once, the DM mentioned that there were a couple of ships near where the party was fighting for their lives. I screamed, "THE SHIPS MUST NOT FALL UNTO DISREPAIR OR HARM!" and abandoned the party to fix/protect the ships.
My favorite time, we were scavenging an abandoned Alliance Tohoku-class crusier. My character made a beeline for the engine rooms. Someone in the party got themselves into serious trouble, and radioed me for help. I said, "can't talk! Mechanizing!" and utterly refused to be distracted - the party eventually convinced my character that there were machines that needed fixing right by the party member in peril. Upon finding no machines, my character quite nearly refused to help the desperate character.

Teach a man to fish, and he'll sell the fish for gold. Show him the Fishing Supplement books from the Oceanic Realm setting, and he'll show up with a character dual wielding Masterwork fishing poles. And then proceed to catch Cthulhu and tame him.

Now, if we're going off of random references in RPG groups, then I'd have to say that the most common thing for my Dragon Age group to reference is League of Legends.

For those that are unfamiliar with LoL, it's a free online fantasy based team vs. team computer game. My group constantly has to make references to LoL,and I guess they've played so much of it that they've begun thinking in terms of the game.

For instance, in LoL they have a scarecrow character who summons crows. Whenever I mention a swarm of crows in the campaign, somebody inevitably has to say -

"Fiddle's Ulting!"

-BTW - an "Ult" is a character's super move, and Fiddlesticks summons a massive swarm of crows.

Also, in the last adventure, the party refused to call the demonically possessed elf by his real name (Mythallan - Elven for "Child of Mercy" - the "mercy" part was ironic). Instead, they had to call him Malzahar, after yet another character in LoL.

Sometimes these references drive me nuts, especially when I'm trying to build up a tense moment - but what can ya do?

I had it worse. The DM himself played LoL, and he actually made characters who were expies of Fiddlestick, Swain and Alistar. BTW, I used to think that minotaur = Alistar. Not anymore, now it's minotaur = Iron Will. 8D

I used to give myself an extra Charisma point for every time I used a quote from a movie that nobody understood. The GM found out I did this when I had, like, 60 Charisma points as a Level 2 Barbarian Dwarf.
I had no idea people in my group had never seen Pirates of the Carribean. It was depressing to say the least.
At least they had seen Princess Bride and Holy Grail.

That's what I thought at the beginning as well. But it just sort of blossomed into seeing how many times I could say "All too easy" or "Get a little backbone will ya?" without getting caught by our rigid railroader of a GM :P

I've had so many of these "Cultural References" spring spontaneously in my games that I lost count...

One time the party was attacking a logging operation being run by an evil witch and a "union" of undead labor. The two fighters in the party fell a large tree on the witch's cabin, which suddenly caused the party to spring into Monty Python's Lumberjack song.

Oh yeah, movie quotes and references are made all the time throughout my games. We do it so much, I even made it into a game mechanic at one point: the party was cursed so that 1 out of every 3 sentences they spoke had to be a quote or reference. Of course, one of them (and me) are huge movie nerds so he and I spoke entire dialogues made solely out of (modified) quotes ar some point. Good times...

Dragon Magazine Race exclusive. Don't exactly remember the name, but it was a race from the shadowfell, which I made a Bladesinger out of. Took a feat that allowed magic missile to be used as an Attack of Opportunity, and a magic item that gave it push of 1 square. It's not as impressive as the metamagic feats masterofgames went over, but the point was to put my opponent where I wanted them, not wipe out the room. I think I would have traded in Magic Missile for another attack that did twice the damage and I could still use as the AoO, but I lost the knock back and my DM outright said that the character was a little on the abusive side.

Back in my first ever Dnd campaign, I was playing with a bunch of newbies. Only one person--had played the game before and knew what he was doing. He was also a total munchkin (though our DM was the sort who approved of munchkins.)

He played a halfling rogue who, especially in the early few levels, totally dominated almost every fight. Us poor newbies built a sort of pseudo-worship around the character, and over the course of the campaign rang up a song--ff7's One-Winged Angel, but with the latin lyrics replaced with ones espousing our love of the rogue. During the part where the choir goes "SEPHIROTH! SEPHIROTH!" We substituted "Halfing Rogue! Halfling Rogue!"

If you guys don't mind, I just have to post what's been happening in our sessions lately. For recap, I play a Dwarf Paladin (Lawful Good out the wazoo), and adventure with a Minotaur Fighter (Just shy of Chaotic Evil), and some other assorted characters.

We're getting close to ending our Crystal Caverns campaign, with the overall theme of two mortals wound up on a Fey island and we were sent to bring them back. We get there and find they’ve now got the souls of the previous Lord and Lady of the island stuck in their bodies, and two Fey armies from different houses are at a standoff over the issue as an old hag and her fiend companion are trying to capture the youths and use the souls to take over the island. We meet with the Fey leaders for information; with my group talking with a Verbeeg (players describe him as a tricky Jolly Green Giant). We learn that he wants to kill the human boy to keep the hag from getting his soul, and sent his cousin Basal to do the job. But we can get to the human first and stop him, by all means.

We get to a Water Palace, where the human is hiding, and are just about to leave when the cousin shows up, saying that he’s been sent to kill the human, but is willing to contest us for the ‘prize’.

Minotaur: “All right then, let’s do-“

Me: “Hold on, guys. He does have a point.”

Others, including DM: “Wait, what?”

Me: “Well, all this conflict is over these two mortals. The hag already has the girl, and if she gets Orlando too, then she’ll control this entire island. Leaving this human alive endangers all of us, and the mortal realm.”

Minotaur: “And your point is…?”

Me: “I say we let Basal finish his mission.”

Minotaur: “What?! You’re just going to let him die? We were hired to bring these kids back to their families!”

Me: “Yes, and they made that deal when they thought the two had just run off into the forest together. The circumstances have changed a little bit.”

Minotaur: “Ok, let me get this straight. You, the Lawful Good Paladin, are advocating we let this boy die. The boy we were hired to save.”

Me: “In order to protect the many, yes.
We need to sacrifice the few if need be.”

Minotaur: “Oh, forget that! We’re taking this guy down!”

Basal: “So, we’re going to fight now?”

Me: “Yes. Yes, it seems we are.”

*Picks up dwarf miniature, places it next to Basal.*

Minotaur: “Wait, what?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but this boy cannot remain alive. For the forces of Good, he must die.”

Ok, here we go. So we’ve got four adventurers facing a Fey giant and a paladin who just turned on the rest of the party. After Basal makes a deal that the two sides will fight until all the others are bloodied, he moves towards the other three while I face the Morningstar-wielding Minotaur, who somehow convinced our DM to give him health regeneration.

Minotaur: “Alright, Davven. You may feel that you can just turn on the rest of our party, but now you have to face me. And let’s face it, you may have good armor, but you’re a healer, not a-“

I attack with my new daily power, and actually deal enough damage to knock him unconscious.

Minotaur’s player: “… as soon as I regenerate, you are dead.”

Me: “Alright, now I’ll just head over to Basal and help him out.” I start heading over to the Vebeeg, but then he turns around and attacks me, too. “Whoa, dude, what the heck?”

Basal: “I enter a room to find a band of non-fey with the human I was sent to kill, and you expect me to trust any of you? You all could be agents of the hag for all I know!”

So then I have to spend a few rounds trying to convince Basal to A) stop attacking me, B) we never were working for the hag, and C) I was on his side, dangit, stop attacking me, when I realize that the Minotaur has regenerated back to consciousness and rises up, yelling at Basal.

Minotaur: “Stop fighting us, you moron! We’re here for the boy, and if you stay in our way, I will crush you! Intimidation roll… huh, nat 20. Nice.”

At this point, our DM Dread_Priest was so relieved to have an out to the mess we were in that he had Basal stand down and concede to the party. Seeing that the battle was over, Davven reluctantly agreed to go with the group back to the Fey with the boy, with the Minotaur walking between him and Orlando.

Turns out Davven messed up, because when we get back to the Fey we learn that if either of the mortals die, the soul that’s trapped in them just gets set loose on the island, meaning the hag would have an even easier time to get them. Whoops. So now, Davven is seen with suspicion by the rest of the party, and the Minotaur only agreed not to kill him after Davven agreed to be punted towards some minor enemies in a travel battle.

And that doesn’t even cover what happened during last night’s encounter.

jajajajajajajajajajajaja Camelot song MLP version XD. i will show that to my brother. he is fan of monty phyton XD.

for the other part im more used to play Mages on D&D. magic misiel may be not a very powerfull spell, but i allways try to use creative use of that or the other spell. XD but even so i made the mistake of casting it on foes invulnerable to it. XD

3e put a cap on how powerful it could get (at 9th level with 5 missiles), but it was still a decent choice for a first level slot.

4e changed it into your standard single-target basic attack (ie, crap but something you might end up using a lot anyway in long fights), then changed it again into a minion-killer (made it autohit but fixed the damage at a very low number).

...that last version would actually be a good choice for shooting at an over-levelled boss. It's not like you'd actually hit with any of your other attacks.

First of all, higher level versions of magic missile from supplements aren't magic missile. I'll get back to that in the final point.

Second of all, a 1st level spell that could cause up to 5d4+5 damage is not as powerful as a 1st level spell that could cause 1d4+1 damage/2 levels.

Third, your 3rd Edition cheese has nothing to do with what happened to magic missile between 1st and 2nd Edition.

Finally, if Issac's greater missile storm can work in combination with a 20th level wizard equipped with two greater metamagic rods and time stop spells, it doesn't have an instantaneous duration, one of magic missile's defining traits. This isn't even like trying to advocate fireball by showing what you can do with a delayed blast fireball; it's more on the scale of saying that fireball is great because of what you can do with an incendiary cloud.

Once when I was GMing, I got a modified Emperor's New Groove reference in by creating a room with two levers, with a sign saying "Choose the right lever; the wrong lever would be disastrous." Someone had written on the sign "Why do they even *have* a wrong lever?" Plus there was a stuffed llama in the room for the sake of the reference. About half the group got it.
Also, I like the story, Ranubis! Way to reinterpret character alignment!

I often make references to Babylon 5. The cryptic old man who talks in riddles will inevitably say one or more of the following: "You are not ready", "Listen to the music, not the song", "Never ask that question", or "Yes" to a "Which one, X or Y?" question.

Then there was the time the party fighter lopped off the arm of a War-Forged with a Sword of Sharpness. The War-Forged picked up it's sword in its other hand and kept going. The player instantly picked up on the reference.

DM: "Upon saying those exact words and casting the spell, a portal opens in the air in front of you. Through the portal can be seen a huge and ancient black dragon wearing a necklace that has a golden rectangular nameplate that reads 'The Darkness'. Your missiles ping off the nameplate. The dragon appears very annoyed at this and he glares through the portal at you. He says 'Prepare yourself. You are my next meal.' The dragon proceeds to slink out of sight as the portal closes."